Amnesty international

Conscious of the fact that there is a very narrow audience for this, I am posting below excerpts from a recent article in The Economist on Amnesty International, which nicely summarizes my irritation with that once-great organization. I'm posting it because (a) you have to be a subscriber to view it online, so I can't just post a link; (b) it gives me a degree of self-satisfaction, in a petty sort of way; and (c) because it proves I'm not the only unfashionable lefty prone to tirades about Amnesty and organizations like it that are more interested in political grandstanding than critically examining where they can make a real difference.

Hopefully somebody besides me will find it interesting.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL is the biggest human-rights organisation in the world, with 70 national chapters and 1.8m-plus members. Its battle honours glitter. It has defended moral giants among prisoners of conscience such as Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov.

Amnesty still champions such causes, rattling dictatorial governments (and governments with dictatorial tendencies). But its mission has also become broader and more ambitious, calling for political and economic improvement as well as freedom from judicial persecution. ...

Many of the movement's most vocal supporters strongly support this stance, increasingly entrenched in Amnesty's thinking; it also chimes well with the visceral opposition to American foreign policy, and to globalisation, that exists in many parts of the world. All that has made Amnesty more popular in some quarters—but also, perhaps, less effective overall. ...

[T]hese days America does seem to have a strangely high priority [for Amnesty], given the enormity of human-rights scandals elsewhere. ... Sometimes there seems to be a desire to be even-handed between pariahs and paragons. ...

Another of Amnesty's 12 campaigns is on “Poverty and Human Rights” which asserts: “Everyone, everywhere has the right to live with dignity. That means that no one should be denied their rights to adequate housing, food, water and sanitation, and to education and health care.”

The big question in all this is priorities. ... [T]he new Amnesty is surely open to the charges both that it is campaigning on too many fronts, and that the latest focus comes at the cost of the old one.

Perhaps unavoidably, the stance taken by Amnesty's increasingly autonomous national chapters in the domestic affairs of their countries is decidedly political. ... Amnesty may to some extent be the captive of its need to keep a mass membership enthused with new and compelling causes. ...

Current and former Amnesty insiders worry that an increasingly grandstanding and unfocused approach makes it ineffective. ...

An organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters' scrutiny.